Yet another laptop recommendation needed

Fraggable

Platinum Member
Jul 20, 2005
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I just started work at a company that does IT services for small-medium businesses (cforward.com). I am one of 3 network technicians there, and will travel to client locations probably 3 days a week. I do everything from desktop support to upgrading Exchange servers.

I need a laptop for work. It has to be fairly durable, I will carry it to and from work 5 days a week, in addition to going to client locations several times a week and to school to get my Bachelor's. I need to be able to put some recorded TV shows on there for when I travel, so a big hard drive is necessary. 2GB of RAM is required, I'm thinking Vista Home Premium would work fine for me. I can configure my Outlook to work over RDP with our Exchange server and have no real need to log onto our domain. I would like a T7300 CPU, but a T7100 is ok too. It also needs to be fairly nice looking, I don't like the way Lenovos look. I'll be doing things like imaging with it, and backing up data to the hard drive temporarily. I wish a 17" laptop with dual hard drives were an option but it's not with the portability required. No gaming will be done on it, but a decent GPU would be great - a 8400M GS or similar is perfect. I need a loger than average battery, like a 9-cell or 12-cell.

I had considered the Inspiron 1520, they're pretty cheap these days with the free upgrades. I want to know what people think about Asus systems specifically, or any other brand I've forgotten about. My budget is under $2K.